“I am a month away from moving out of Providence. While on its face I like my neighborhood, the level of crime and noise are far in excess of what I will tolerate … Illegally modified vehicles traverse through my street all day every day, 24/7. If you haven’t personally experienced this, imagine a grenade going off, or high caliber gunfire, at 3:oo a.m. any given night of the week. That is … not an exaggeration of what residents experience daily with these modified cars and motorcycles …
But there seems to be a political tolerance for this — no will or spine has been shown to address these issues. If police set up a checkpoint on North Main Street and Canal, I can’t even imagine how many citations … they could issue in a single day. This is my second contact with your office on this issue. I also contacted my Ward 2 councilor, who did not reply.”
— E-mail addressed to Mayor Smiley and the Noise Project from soon-to-be-former 15-year PVD resident (April 2026)
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Follow-up message from resident: “On top of [“ATV gangs”], I get exposure to the stream of illegal exhausts on all of these modified cars and motorcycles. In addition to that, it’s a daily experience to have someone driving through the neighborhood with their after-market car stereo system blasting their music … that everybody within two or three blocks can hear. The sound during the day is a nuisance and unpleasant, but at night when people are trying to sleep this is and should be criminal.
The impact on me and I assume everybody in my neighborhood is distressed sleep I very infrequently have a solid night of restful sleep. I run a white noise generator while I sleep to try to mitigate some of the noise but that’s never going to be effective against the music or vehicle exhausts … What I would like to see the city (and state) do first and foremost is enforce the laws that are already on the books … Run information campaigns. Set up random inspection checkpoints and pull cars off the streets when they are overtly in gross violation.
My and my peers’ questions are: Do the politicians have the will and spine? Are they beholden to special-interest groups? Are they asleep at the wheel?”